Today I realized that I’m caught in low limit nirvana, the wasteland, nowhere, whatever you would like to call it. At the limits I’m currently playing (not higher than .25/.50) there are some good players (and I would consider myself one of those), but mostly mediocre to bad players.

Good stuff if and only if you can take full advantage of it and recently I can’t – don’t get me wrong: if you substract variance I’m a winning player and you shouldn’t count short term results anyway, so it’s all good – but still: playing at those levels keeps me in a endless loop of winning and losing (mostly on bad beats or at least getting drawn out with incorrect odds) and there’s not much I can do.

How should I put it?! Playing at those levels takes away some of your best options. You can wait and wait for monster hands and then bet the living jebus out of them, just to see them win in some cases or get a horrible beat. Nothing much in between. Example: one of the precious “tools” of poker is the bluff, right? The catch: at the levels I’m playing there’s a deadly mix of players involved in almost every hand I play – the majority will call you no matter what, even with fourth pair on a straight-, flush- or any scary-board in general…the good ol’ “I don’t believe you”, “I’ll be the sheriff this round, I can’t let anyone bluff me!”, “I wanna see that” attitude…so the bluff is mostly out of the picture (unless I’m heads up with a player which has proven his/her ability to laydown a hand – after all that’s one of the reasons why you keep book, right?). So what to do, what to do?

Two possibilities:

Move up in limits. That’s no guarantee for a donkey free zone though and with my current bankroll constraints it’s basically out of the picture – no point in trying to survive on a short short roll, it would be the recipe for destruction.

Stay at the same level and deal with the daily hurting involved in grinding it out.

So, I’m basically stuck…damn! I guess I’ll schedule poker free days from now on to alleviate the pain…I guess a titanium cup won’t hurt either, so I’m ordering one tomorrow 😉